A Defeat Without a War
"A Defeat Without a War" was the 65th Special Comment delivered on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and the antepenultimate Comment aired on the program's MSNBC incarnation, airing on 7 December 2010. The Comment Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the tax compromise. To paraphrase Churchill, again, let me begin by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing: "that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road. We should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of American politics and policy have been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being, been pronounced against this Administration: 'thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting'." In exchange for selling out a principle campaign pledge, and the people to whom and for whom it was made. In exchange for betraying the truth that the idle and corporate rich of this country have gotten unprecedented and wholly indefensible tax cuts for a decade. In exchange for giving the idle and corporate rich of this country two more years in which to accumulate still more, and more vast piles of personal wealth with which they can buy and sell everybody else. In exchange for extending what he spent the weeks before the mid-terms calling "tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires" to people who have proven, without a scintilla of doubt, without even a fig leaf of phony effort to make it look like they would do otherwise, that they will keep the money for themselves. In exchange for injecting new vigor into the infantile, moronic, disproved-for-a-decade three-card monte game of an economic theory purveyed by these treacherous and ultimately traitorous Republicans, that tax cuts for the rich will somehow lead to job creation even though if that had ever been true in the slightest the economy would not be where it is today. In exchange for giving tax cuts for the rich which the nation cannot afford, and extending their vintage through the next election and thus promising at best a reenactment of this whole sorry, amoral, degrading spectacle in the winter of 2012 and at worst a rubber-stamp from a wholly Republican House and Senate and even White House. In exchange for this searing and transcendent capitulation, the President got just thirteen months of extended benefits for those unemployed less than 100 weeks. And he got nothing absolutely nothing for those unemployed for longer — the 99ers. This the Administration is celebrating — taking the victims of Republican Economic Policy, taking the living breathing proof that the Bush Tax Cuts for the rich do not create jobs, and putting economic bullseyes on their backs as of next December. On the one hand— Unaffordable Tax breaks for the beneficiariesof the Bush tax cuts, made ever more permanent as they threaten to suck four trillion dollars out of government revenues in the next decade. On the other hand: An insufficient dead-end unemployment solution for Americans who would actually work for a living, made ever more temporary. And we are hearing nothing about those 99ers. Even though the numbers of them will balloon from two million to four million or more by next December, even with this deal. Even though just last Thursday, the President's own Council of Economic Advisers reiterated the reality that the easiest way to create jobs and keep jobs is to make sure that the unemployed continue to have money to spend. The unemployed — unlike the rich whom this President has just bowed to are, in fact, the job creators. They do not have investment portfolios to expand. They do not have vast savings into which to stuff the government checks. They have to spend the money. And the Council reported last week that when someone becomes a 99er his or her household loses at least a third of its income. And where the 99er was the sole breadwinner — four households out of ten — they lose 9/10ths of their income. The economy is surprisingly simple. If business and the rich won't spend, and the middle class can't spend, the only factor left to keep pushing money into the insatiable maw of capitalism is the government. So, should the government give the money to the rich who keep it, or the not rich, who spend it? Apparently this President does not know the answer to that question. Even though he has his own Council of Economic Advisers. Mr. President, for these meager crumbs, you have given up costly, insulting, divisive, destructive tax cuts for the rich and you have given in to Republican blackmail which will be followed by more Republican blackmail. Of course, it's not just tax cuts for the rich that you've given up. There is also your new temporary payroll tax holiday, establishing a precedent that the way money is pumped into Social Security should be negotiated and traded off and making it just that much easier to gut Social Security later. And, oh by the way, in the middle of a crisis over making temporary Republican tax cuts permanent, you give the Republicans another temporary Republican tax cut that they can come back later to blackmail you into making permanent. Well, Sir, at least that's the end of it. Except, of course, for the estate tax, what Republicans so happily call, "the death tax." Which will be reduced from its 2009 levels. Huh? The money given by one dead rich person to some living rich persons, will not be taxed, up to five million dollars. More than five million and it's 35 percent — which is less than it was under the tax laws of President Bush's last fiscal year. Sir, you have given undeserved tax breaks — and you have carved them a little more deeply into the stone of law - to rich people, living and dead. And you want me to tell them which Democrat proposed the Estate Tax giveaway? Blanche Lincoln! Blanche Lincoln, repudiated by nearly half the Arkansans in her own party, and then repudiated by 63% of the voters in Arkansas. Mr. President, you're listening to Blanche Lincoln? What? Were Bob Beckel and Pat Caddell unavailable? This President negotiates down from a position of strength better than any politician in our recent history. It is too late now to go back and ask why the President, why the wobbly Democratic leadership, whiffed on its chance to force John Boehner to put his money where his mouth was. In September Boehner said if he had no other option, of course he would vote to extend tax breaks only for the middle class. So the President and the Democrats gave him another option, naturally. But didn't extending the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy became necessary to get Republican support for extending the jobless benefits? Nonsense. Five times in the last two years, the Republicans have gone along with extending those jobless benefits, and they've done it without being bribed with tax cuts for the rich. Even now Boehner's September confession, and the GOP's unwillingness to take the blame for killing off jobless benefits, offered an alternative blueprint for this President: Let the law expire as scheduled in 24 days. Let all the tax breaks go, and when the Republicans take over the House and try to pass them anew, if they somehow are not stopped in the Senate, veto anything that does not keep tax cuts for the middle class and unemployment benefits as the dog, and perks for the rich as the tail. The GOP is still terrified of being blamed for cutting off the unemployed. You take that fact and you break them with it. There is only one possible rational explanation for this irrational and childish transaction. There are Republicans and Tea Partiers who are still intent on cutting off their noses to spite their faces — the "Blind Rage Conservatives" for whom any compromise is disaster, just as for this President, apparently no compromise is disaster. Maybe the reason the Administration's numbers don't add up in this deal is that it was too busy instead counting votes and there really are enough on the Far Right to sink it and the President winds up having his cake and eating it too, proposing what he can call a "tax compromise" and then having it derailed publicly and embarrassingly by the Republicans. Maybe the political calculus here exceeds both in priority and quality, the real calculus. But I deeply doubt it. Yesterday I had an exchange with a very Senior member of this Administration who wanted to sell me on this deal. I pointed out that that was fine, except that — as I phrased it to him — "frankly the base has just vanished." "Well," he replied, "then they must not have read the details." There, in a nutshell, is this Administration. They didn't make a bad deal — we just don't understand it. Just as it was our fault, Mr President, for not understanding your refusal of even the most perfunctory of investigations of rendition or domestic spying or the other crimes of the Bush Administration, or why you have now established for those future Administrations who want to repeat those crimes, that the punishment for them will be nothing. Just as it was our fault, Mr. President, for not understanding Afghanistan. Just as we didn't correctly perceive, Sir, the necessity for the continuation of Gitmo. Or how we failed to intuit, President Obama, your preemptive abandonment of Single Payer and the Public Option. Or how we couldn't have foreseen your foot-dragging on "Don't ask, don't tell." Just as we shouldn't have gotten you angry at your news conference today and made all the moderate Democrats wonder why in the hell you get publicly angry so often at the liberals who campaigned for you and whether you might save just a touch of that sarcasm and that self-martyrdom for the Republicans. And of course, Mr. President how we totally betrayed your Administration by not concluding our prayers every night by saying "Thank you for preventing another Great Depression, you are entitled to skate along on your own wonderfulness indefinitely and if you get less than you could have on Health Care Reform or taxes, well, that'll be okay, we're happy to pay $10,000 for a $300 car because hey, it could've been $20,000, right? And because we only expect you to do one thing correctly during a presidency and you had pretty much cleared that obligation when it proved that you were, indeed, not John McCain." We are very very sorry. In some sense, the Senior Member's remark about how we "did not read the details" is not utterly absurd. We have enabled this President, and his compromises-spinning-within-compromises. And now there are, finally, those within his own party who have said "enough." In the Senate, the Independent, Mr. Sanders has threatened to filibuster this deal. He deserves the support of every American in doing so, as does Mr. Conyers and Mr. McDermott and the others in the house. It is not disloyalty to the Democratic party to tell a Democratic president he is wrong; it is not disloyalty to tell him he is goddamned wrong. It is not disloyalty for the 99ers and the 99ers-to-be to rally in the streets of Washington. It is not disloyalty to remind the President that he was elected by people to whom he had given a clear outline of what he would do for them, and if he does not steer out of the skid of what he is doing to them, he will not only not be re-elected, he may not even be re-nominated. It is not disloyalty to remind him that we are not bound to an individual. We are bound to principles. If the individual changes, or fails often and needlessly, then we get a new man. Or woman. None of that is disloyalty. It is self-defense. It is the acknowledgment that, as my hero Thurber wrote, you might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards. That is what the base is saying to this President, about his Presidency. "Well, then, (we) must not have read the details." The Churchill quotation — as opposed to the quotation from the very Senior member of your Administration, Mr. President — is from October 5th, 1938. I don't want to make any true comparison to the historical event to which it related; the viewer can go ahead and look it up if they wish. I will confess I won't fight if anybody wants to draw a comparison between what you've done with our domestic politics of our day, to what Neville Chamberlain did with the international politics of his. The rest of what Churchill said, paraphrased — but only slightly paraphrased — bears repeating again. The terrible words have for the time being, been pronounced against this Administration: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and political vigor, we arise again and take our stand for what is right. See Also Defeat Without a War